The Oconee County Elections and Registration Office on Monday began verifying the petitions with Oconee County signers to put Kalki Yalamanchili on the November ballot as an independent candidate for Western Judicial Circuit District Attorney.
The Georgia Office of the Secretary of State has given the election offices in both Oconee and Clarke counties until July 26 to complete the verification process.
Sharon Gregg, Director of Elections and Registration for Oconee County, said the two counties began the verification process after the Secretary of State's general counsel said that any petition sheets containing signatures of voters from both Oconee and Clarke counties should be disregarded.
Gregg said Oconee County Attorney Daniel Haygood concurred with that decision.
On July 1, Yalamanchili announced in a press conference in Athens that he had submitted more than 14,000 signatures to the Secretary of State Office and that a professional company hired to audit the project “verified nearly 10,000 signatures.”
Yalamanchili will need 5,694 verified signatures on the petitions, representing five percent of the voters in Oconee and Clarke counties participating in the last election for district attorney, according to Gregg and Charlotte Sosebee, Director of Elections and Voter Registration in Clarke County.
Petitions are formatted to contain a maximum of 15 signatures, but not all of the petitions submitted will be filled out completely. Gregg has said she does not have a number of signatures that her office has to evaluate.
“We are focusing all of our time and attention to ensure that we meet the deadline given to us,” Gregg said on Thursday afternoon.
Yalamanchili Petition Drive
Yalamanchili, who lives in Oconee County, launched the visible part of his petition drive on Feb. 15 with seven locations, four in Oconee County and three in Clarke County, where voters could go to sign the petition to put him on the ballot
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| Yalamanchili Picture Provided With News Release 7/1/2024 |
Yalamanchili, an attorney who formerly worked in the Western Judicial Circuit District Attorney Office, is seeking to unseat incumbent Deborah Gonzalez, who ran unopposed in the May Democratic Party Primary.
No Republican qualified, so Gonzalez and Yalamanchili, if his petition drive is successful, will be the only two candidates on the November ballot.
“The District Attorney’s Office is not a place for political partisanship,” Yalamanchili is quoted as saying in a news release on July 1. “Justice for all means an office that does the right thing the right way, regardless of who is watching,” the quote continues.
Yalamanchili has appeared before both the Oconee County Republican Party and the Oconee County Democratic Party and participated in an exchange with Gonzalez in a meeting of the Oconee County Democrats in May.
Decision On Petition Disqualification
Gregg said that the Secretary of State Office and County Attorney Haygood relied on Georgia Code (O.C.G.A. 21-2-170(d) and O.C.G.A. 21-2-171) in deciding that “the (petition) sheets containing signatures of electors from both counties should be disregarded.”
O.C.G.A. 21-2-170(d) states that “A nomination petition shall be on one or more sheets of uniform size and different sheets must be used by signers resident in different counties or municipalities.”
O.C.G.A. 21-2-171 states that “The Secretary of State or any superintendent shall review the petition for compliance with the provisions of Code Section 21-2-170 and shall disregard any pages or signatures that are not in conformance with the provisions of that Code section.”
Gregg said she did not know the number of petition sheets that contained the signatures of voters in both of the counties.
The sheets require voters to list their names and addresses and the county in which they live. They also must sign the petition with a signature that matches their signature on file with their voting record.
I submitted one petition sheet with 15 names of voters in Oconee County to Yalamanchili. Mostly, they came from my neighbors.
I told Yalamanchili and those I asked if they wanted to sign the petition that I was not endorsing Yalamanchili but was supporting his effort to get his name on the ballot, as I have done for independent candidates in the past.
1 comment:
In a fair and just world, the BOE&R is reviewing the signature pages that include both Oconee and Clarke-County with a SOS investigator to launch an investigation.
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